Blizzard COO: We hope Titan will still be growing in 20 years

Finding (or developing) the first real World of Warcraft-killer is something of a holy grail for MMO fans and developers alike. The extraordinary success of Blizzard's fantasy title has set the company and its flagship product on a seemingly unreachable pedestal in terms of financial success and subscriber numbers.

Conventional wisdom says that's unlikely to be duplicated any time soon, if ever, but Blizzard COO Paul Sams isn't so sure. In a new interview with Gamasutra, he talks a bit about Titan, the code name for the as-yet-unannounced followup to World of Warcraft. "I believe [it's] the most ambitious thing we've ever attempted," Sams told Gamasutra. "And I feel like we have set our company up to succeed on that. We have some of our most talented and most experienced developers on that team. Many of the people that built World of Warcraft are full time on that other team."

Will WoW's 12 million subscribers jump ship and make Titan the raging success that its predecessor was? "The thing that we hope will happen is that it will not stop World of Warcraft but we believe it will eclipse it," Sams said, before adding that he expects Titan to be an industry force over the next two decades.